In
a hotel room behind Mumbai airport on a stopover en route to South Africa way before
the Indian-designers-abroad boom, nanga-panga Rina Dhaka lets you in on a secret.
"I'm too fat," she says. Purely as gut reaction, you almost breakout laughing,
but in the presence of an exalted highness of the fashion Mafia, you hold your peace. Time
enough later to mull over her words.
For Dhaka is thin like a stick, almost, her
waist competition enough for any of the lean-limbed exotic creatures of indescribable
beauty acrawl about the room. Maybe she says it to check your reactions, for but ten
minutes later she's waxing eloquent on the flow of the creative juices. "I've always
been a dreamer, even in school, a very visual person," she throws out.
Dhaka's design roots came in place of her
other great ambition: her delicate bones structure not withstanding, she wanted to be a
movie star, "But my family wouldn't hear of it," she rues quietly,
"but maybe," she says, "maybe I can do it now..."
Stitch One
Back then, she took her dreams to a South Delhi polytechnic, following through with
training, first at Intercraft, later under designer Evan Grandhall, and a stint
with export and buying houses. When Mutiny and Ensemble opened at the end of the 80s,
Dhaka, encouraged by the late Rohit Khosla, put her first domestic rack line out:
naturally, it was very well received, whence the drama began.
Predominantly Western wear, there followed
theme collections: knit, net, sheers, lycra, crochet, stretch jersey, woolens, dori work,
a lot of it dare-bare, much of it previewed on Dhaka's own body, almost all of it raising
eyebrows and controversy alike.
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